Preach It

Meryl Streep Has a Perfect Explanation of Sexism in Hollywood

Meryl Streep—the Walt Disney–slamming, Patricia Arquette–cheering, ageism-combating feminist heroine of our dreams—is at it again. During a panel conversation with directors Ava DuVernay and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, moderated by Jon Stewart, Streep described the hardest thing for an actress to do—to get anyone but women to identify with them on-screen.

As evidenced by everything from the way toys are marketed to which movies win Oscars, the general assumption is that women will identify with female and male characters, while men will only identify with other men. Or, as Streep puts it, “I wanted to be Tom Sawyer, not Becky.” (The way she says “Becky,” by the way, is 19 Oscar nominations worth of talent in two syllables.) For Streep, the hardest thing as an actress is “to have a story that men in the audience feel like they know what I feel like.” In the video, you can see DuVernay—who beefed up the role of Coretta Scott King in the script for Selma—and Obaid-Chinoy—who won an Oscar for a 2012 documentary about women attacked with acid in Pakistan—nodding in agreement.

In her elegant, actor-focused way, Streep is describing the problem that drives so many decisions in Hollywood—why there are soon to be eight Batman movies but none yet about Wonder Woman, why nobody expected The Hunger Games or Twilight to be a hit, why it’s taken until apparently this year to put a lighsaber in Princess Leia’s hands. She can’t fix it herself, of course, much as we firmly believe the world would be a better place with Meryl in charge of everything. But the more Streep speaks her mind onstage and shouts from the audience at the Oscars, the better shot we all have at leveling the playing field.